


Gutters and Stars

by 9_miho



Series: Seven Made One [8]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Game of Thrones (TV), Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Anthropomorphic Personifications, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 04:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3194936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_miho/pseuds/9_miho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing.</i> Woman.<i> Thass what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils.</i> Teeth. <i>That's what it, she, did. She wasa...thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen.</i> Bitch.<i>”</i></p><p>― Terry Pratchett, <i>Guards! Guards!</i></p><p>“What is your name, sweet thing?” she breathed against his mouth in a strange accent that tasted of so many different lands and peoples.</p><p> </p><p>“Crownlands, King’s Landing,” he gasped, intoxicated with her, as she was some dark mirror of him but something all her own too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gutters and Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from the classic line from Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan”: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

The woman was tall and wide-hipped. She was not well-blessed with teats though she wore some contraption of leather and thick cloth that pushed what she did have upwards in a rather pleasing way. Perhaps she could have been his sister; her hair was the same mud brown as his, though it had hints of deep, putrid green when rare shafts of sunlight caught it. He noticed those momentary glimmers of color in that seemingly ordinary hair only because they matched the strange green of her eyes.

When they first met, she danced with him with a knife without thinking, without deadly insult or formal exchange of pleasantries. That assessment he had made immediately, considering the color of her hair and eyes, the size of her tits and the wide curve of her hips, it was suddenly not enough because she laughed as she tried to kill him with her long knife. Without magic (spells or illusions or womanly charm), she somehow became beautiful, her wide mouth in a grin that was as bright and lovely and sharp as broken glass. 

She lost her hat in their blade dance and he so very wanted that hat, that odd contraption made from some shiny black fabric that was now green with age, fastened into a high tube and with a narrow, slightly upturned brim. That hat had a ribbon of quicksilver and a bundle of shining red berries, though it was all to naught as it fell into a puddle of piss.

Soon enough they were in a stranger dance, her hands grabbing his wrists and they were spinning about wildly, somehow dodging the rivulets and little ponds of filth on the street. She wore heavy-soled shoes on which she could somehow dance more lightly than ladies ever could on silk slippers.

Then she kissed him, her mouth tasting of ash and stale ale and river mud and something so sweet he had no words for it. 

“What is your name, sweet thing?” she breathed against his mouth in a strange accent that tasted of so many different lands and peoples.

“Crownlands, King’s Landing,” he gasped, intoxicated with her, as she was some dark mirror of him but something all her own too. 

She frowned for a moment. He saw that she used pink wax to paint her mouth, something thicker, stronger than the berry juice that the whores on Silk Street preferred. She studied his face. “I don’t like crowns particularly,” she said after a while. “Especially the heads under them.”

But she leaned in to rest her forehead against his. “But we can’t help that, can we?” she murmured. “I’m Ankh-Morpork. City of A Thousand Delights.”

…

The Crownlands didn’t know how Ankh Morpork could make it to his territory but he couldn’t follow to hers. “You have mostly dead magic in this world,” she said, that day wearing a peacock blue robe over a very severe black dress and bright red boots. She was a pickpocket’s dream but she’d already managed to break the wrists of three of them and news like her got around better than last night’s missing cat in Flea Bottom.

“Are you a witch?” Crownlands asked suspiciously. 

She grinned brown-stained teeth at him. “I only dress like one and that helps quite a bit,” she said cheerfully as she passed him a metal bottle filled with something bitter, sweet and creamy. He sipped it and rather liked it.

“I suppose it’s something like quantum,” she continued absentmindedly as she picked through an over-yeasted loaf of bread he had gotten for her. He watched as rats came scuttling out from nearby barrels and begging like puppies for the crumbs she picked off for them. “Or Narrative Causality,” she added, but it didn’t sound addressed to him. The remark sent an unexpected chill and torpor over him and he tried to think of something else.

He now noticed that she was missing an eyebrow and part of her face seemed pinker than usual. She caught her glance and grimaced. “The Alchemists blew up their Guild again,” she said. “While there was a cart taking a new batch of foundlings to the Sunshine Sanctuary. Little things but I was nearby and well… damage isn’t all meta-mo-phorical”

“Ah,” he managed to say, contemplating the carnage. But he suspected that it didn’t do much, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, right?

“Sybil was distraught of course and I do like the little buggers, even if they do crap down your back and stain dresses something dreadful,” she said as she fed the last of the bread to a particularly sleek specimen of a rat. 

“You carry… children on your back?” he asked.

“Swamp dragons,” she added. “Don’t you know? Or is this one of those places where dragons aren’t real? I’ve heard of worlds like that. Seen a few of ‘em too.”

“They were real. A long time ago,” he said slowly. She nodded but she had bent down to listen to the sleek rat, which had pitch black fur and a missing right ear. “Oh- the Red Keep? The skulls?” she asked.

Crownlands had seen a lot of odd things in his life, including people talking at animals with the full expectation of being answered. But this was somehow… different. “I’ll take you,” he offered. “I’ve been there lots of times.”

Her smile was sweet. “But you don’t get to take anything from there,” he added irritably, wondering if he’d read her expression right. Her pout confirmed his estimation.

But in exchange for the tour, she did bring him a basket of swamp dragons to touch and hold. The little lizards crawled over each other to beg for the crumbs of black rock that Ankh Morpork fed them, to his eyes living jewels that smelled curiously rank and acrid. To his dismay, his hands trembled slightly when he managed to hold one, even though it was smaller than a kitten, with absolutely no claws to speak of, and only able to make a candle’s worth of flame at a time.

…

For all that he knew Ankh Morpork was a grasping soul, avaricious and voracious, he knew that she could be quite generous in her own way. She brought him things, including a silk hat like the one she sometimes wore. Some of them were just for him to see but some were for him to keep, like aforesaid hat.

She never let him keep magic, the little dragons, the toys, the iconograph she used to take a picture of him and her in such vivid color that he was utterly unnerved by it. 

“I’m living on a world that’s side by side to yours, like pages in a book,” she told him when he came close to actually begging her for the iconograph (he would wheedle, bribe, blackmail, whine, cheat, but never beg). “If I bring my magic along and gave it to you… it’s like the pages weaving with each other.” Then she looked pitying. “I don’t want mine to be with yours,” she said. She added under her breath, “And Lu Tze would never give me any rest if I muck up things that badly.”

That visit, she had brought along a paper box filled with hot sausages tucked into small, long loaves of bread. He didn’t have much money that time so the best he could manage was smallbeer and bowls of brown – he didn’t like being in debt to her since he suspected she’d be even worse to him than the Iron Bank.

“Dibbler’s sausage-inna-bun,” she pronounced as she picked one up and handed it to him. “A gift that’ll keep givin’, especially given to someone else.” But she also picked one up and after some contemplation, dipped part of it into her bowl of brown. She took a bite, chewed for a while as he stared at her in morbid fascination.

“Both become pretty tolerable that way,” she said, mouth still slightly full and she bit down hard enough that he could hear her strong teeth going through… something. 

Crownlands looked at the sausage… in a bun and at the bowl. And he shrugged and emulated her. She was right, of course, though he didn’t want to admit it.

 

…

She found him after the Battle of Blackwater. She was dressed in sober black but in scandalous breeches and a pressed white shirt, one gloved hand holding a hard leather case. 

He looked at her, his face covered in red and black flecks of burns. The damage was small but deep and he was far from healthy from siege. Without a word, Ankh Morpork helped him to his feet and he trembled on too skinny legs. She found him lodging somewhere discreet and clean, just off the Street of Silk, and she opened her case to pull out jars and bottles to soothe the pain at the very least. This kind of damage only took time to heal, he knew, but they could stave off the pain for a little while.

“I almost burned before,” he said to her as she passed him a bitter dark drink that made the ache lessen slightly but didn’t make him dreamy like milk of the poppy.

She arched a thin eyebrow (Alchemists again). “Pyromancers,” he said with disgust. “And a mad King. He wanted to see this city as his entire funeral pyre. He even thought he might just rise from the green flame as a dragon.”

“I know about mad kings,” Ankh Morpork said mildly. “Had lots of ‘em. Marrying your nieces several times over doesn’t do well for you.”

“They married their sisters,” Crownlands replied.

“Ugh. And that’s the nasty business over in Djelibeybi,” she shuddered. “Next thing you know, you’re makin’ pyramids all over the place too…” Her voice trailed off.

He was always bemused by her asides, sometimes comforted. Right now, he hated her for them. “I would have burned to the ground,” he gritted. “I would have been a black walking corpse for months, waiting for the city to be rebuilt, or maybe it would have been left because it reeked of death and no one could bother going to a cursed place and left it there like Harrenhal.”

Ankh Morpork did not look pitying. She merely undid her vest (waistcoat) and shirt and complicated underpinnings of canvas and metal and cord and she let her clothes slip to the mostly clean floor. The woman turned her back to him and spread her arms, showing pink scars all down her back, sunbursts and spider webs and thick, ugly knots. 

“I’ve burned many times,” Ankh Morpork said to him, looking over her shoulder. “Many, many times. To the ground. And I’ve burned to ash. But I am always rebuilt.”

“Because your precious Patrician loves you,” he replied bitterly.

“As close as Vetinari can love,” Ankh Morpork sighed dreamily, unashamed of sentiment. “Save for his dog. But I burned once under his watch. Only once.”

“Is this comfort?” Crownlands demanded.

She shrugged. “Maybe. Because I can’t give you pity when I’ve burnt a lot too.” She put on her clothes again and he studied her long fingers lacing her undergarment (corset) and doing the buttons of her shirt and waistcoat.

Crownlands closed his eyes and felt bitterness yawn open wide in his chest. “Save your damned pity. I don’t live in the same story you do. You have Watchmen. You have a Patrician. You are a great mass machine – this… thing that works beautifully. I don’t live in your story. I can’t laugh like you.” He gave a snarling laugh. “And you’re less comfort than a whore because your lie only makes me feel worse.”

To his disgust, she did not bother to even show anger. Ankh Morpork merely snorted. “Then stay there,” she said. “Stay there in the gutter. You might as well let it just happen to you.”

“And you don’t?” he snapped.

“Maybe, maybe not. But I can still throw my arms open wide and welcome ‘em in, let them into my rotted heart and let them keep my bones upright and my lights burning as they spend and celebrate and become one of my own. And they can bring the stars down to themselves even if they are cheap and gaudy and no way like real stars.”

Crownlands opened his eyes to see her leaning over him. “If you’re giving me hope, you’re the cruelest thing I know,” he said to her.

“Ain’t hope,” she said. “Just a push. Or an extra light when yours is guttering.” 

Her hair had come tumbling down and he touched it slowly. It was surprisingly soft to his fingers.

“Then where do I go?” he asked.

“Can’t help you with that,” she said. “’less you pay me.”

“Can’t afford you,” he muttered.

She laughed and it was both beautiful and discordant, like bells cast ever so slightly out of tune. But she stayed with him until the sun went down and then she left, having pressed a pink wax kiss against his cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> And the main thing that happened was that together, Ankh Morpork and Crownlands created the first chili dog.


End file.
